According to
Princeton, the definition of atheist is "the doctrine or belief there is no God"/"a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods". This has been the standard definition of atheism, and as such, when confronted with the idea of 21% of atheists believing in a God, a person's standard reaction is to just claim that the people who answered the poll question just didn't know what the word "atheist" means.
There may actually be a way to test that hypothesis, in a round-about way.
The idea for this experiment came from a man named
Razib Khan:
Razib Khan has a background in biology and biochemistry. He is a Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the Western United States.
He recently studied people who answered polls
"heterodoxly" (example: non-theists who believe in an afterlife, Catholics who believe there is no afterlife, etc.). He concluded that there is a relationship between hetrodoxy and intelligence: non-theists who believe in an afterlife are less intelligence than atheists who disbelieve in an afterlife, and some religious people (including Catholics) who disbelieve in an afterlife are less intelligence than religious people who believe in an afterlife. He concluded:
"[T]hose who are less systematic in their thinking tend to exhibit these confusions, and, they don’t do as well academically in keeping with their lack of systematic thinking proficiency."
If Razib Khan is right, then this could provide a plausible reason for why Theist Atheists exist: if these people are "less systemic" in their thinking, and may not realize that they are using the word 'atheist' wrongly.
Razib Khan measured intelligence using WORDSUM, which has a 0.7 correlation with IQ. Pew did not measure intelligence in that manner. But they did ask people to tell their education level, and under the assumption that education correlates to intelligence, I decided to compare the education levels of Theist Atheists and Atheist Atheists (self-described atheists who say they do not believe in God). I have excluded studying 'atheists' who said "other" or "don't know" to the question of god existing.
Theist Atheists pre-dominate amongst Incomplete High School, Complete High School, Technical/Vocational School, and Incomplete College, while Atheist Atheists pre-dominate amongst Complete College, and Post-Graduate and Professional school.
I then coded education as a variable, with 1 being the lowest (None/Grade 1-8), and 7 being the highest (post-graduate/professional schooling). The average education level of Theist Atheists is 4.681, while the average education level of Atheist Atheist is 5.496. So it does
appear as if Atheist Atheists have a higher education level than Theist Atheists.
However, is there a correlation between education level and belief-in-god amongst Atheists? To check, I coded 'belief in god' as a variable, with 1 being belief, and 0 being non-belief. The linear correlation between education and belief in God is 0.0495, which I find to be incredibly,
incredibly low. I then determined the "coeffienct of determination" (R^2) value to be 0.0404. The coeffienct of determination usually varies between 0 and 1, with 0 indicating no lineral relatonship and 1 indicating a complete lineral relationship. A value like 0.0404 can be explained as "4% of the variation in education (Depedent Variable) can be explained by the independent variable (Belief in God)".
With such a very low correlation, and R^2 value, it appears as if Atheists' education level has very little effect on belief in God. I have to reject therefore Razib Khan's contention that hetrodoxoy can be explained by a lack of intelligence (assuming, of course, education is correlated with intelligence).
EDIT: I made a mistake here, I used the wrong correlation value of 0.0495...the
correct correlation value was -0.8184, which is incredibly siginificant. However, the R^2 is the same, 0.0404, and this is why I reject the hypothesis.
EDIT2: (March 1st, 2011) The image file I used here broke, so I decided to reupload the image.
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Since that was a rather lame post, I'll show off a quote by an Atheist who have proclaimed belief in God, which seemed to be very useful in orienating my research. This quote was in the comments of a
New York Times blog, and I cannot verify if this quote is a troll or not. Nevertheless, it does offer some insight into at least a "section" of Theist Atheists. I'll examine this quote in detail and try to mine any hypothesis that I could then "test".
"Here’s another possible explanation for the discrepancy: Atheism is the rejection not of God, but of theism–or, to put it another way, the rejection of the God of theism.
My favorite example is Spinoza (perhaps because I am a Spinoza scholar). He was accused by many of his contemporaries of being an atheist, even though God is the most central concept in his entire philosophy. What he refers to as “God”, however, would not be recognized as such by many traditional believers.
He used the term “God” interchangeably with “Nature” (one often finds in his writing the phrase “deus sive natura”, “God or Nature”). This, however, should not be confused with pantheism which, as I understand the term, endows nature with a personality. Spinoza’s God is impersonal.
I believe that Spinoza’s God exists–and necessarily so, by definition (the totality of all that exists must exist!)–but would still consider myself an atheist.
The key point of contention, then, is over the notion of God. The survey distinguishes between personal and impersonal conceptions of God and I would be surprised if many of the professed atheists embraced a personal God. That just seems like a contradiction rather than a subtlety of belief.
Nonetheless, I imagine there’s a variety of rationales for answering survey questions in this way, and what I present is just one possible interpretation. I doubt most people are as thoughtful about the matter as Spinoza was."---DomE
Author
Topic: Studying Theist Atheism (Read 9318 times)